Read Online Voices in Our Blood by Jon Meacham - Free Book Online Page B

asked the Negro a few questions, and as I sat there taking it all in I heard a man I knew turn to Willie Johnson and say, in a strangely subdued voice, sounding not at all like himself: “Nigger, I just want to tell you one thing, and you better get it straight, because I ain’t gonna repeat it. . . . If I so much as see you walkin’ down the sidewalk in front of our house, I’ll blow your head off.”
    A young boy grew up with other things: with the myths, the stories handed down. One of them concerned one of the town’s policemen, a gnarled and skinny old man by the time I was growing up, who had shot a Negro on the sidewalk on the lower end of Main Street and stood over him with his pistol to prevent anyone from taking him away while he bled to death. Whether it was apocryphal or not was almost irrelevant, for the terror of that story was quite enough; we saw the policeman almost everyday, making his rounds of the parking meters. “Don’t fool with ol’ ——,” someone would say. “He’d just as soon shoot you as
look
at you,” and then recount the legend in gory detail. There was the tale of the white planter, who owned one of the big plantations in the delta. When one of his Negro hands looked too closely at his wife one day, the man got his gun and killed him, and there was no trial.
    There were a boy’s recurring sense impressions of a hovering violence, isolated acts that remained in my memory long afterward, as senseless and unpatterned later as they had been for me when they happened:
    . . . Some white men came to see my father, when I was six or seven years old. I heard them talking at the front door. “We hear the niggers might cause trouble tonight,” one of them said. My father went to town to buy some extra shotgun shells, and we locked all our doors and windows when the sun went down.
    . . . A Negro shot and killed a white man at the honky-tonk near the town dump. When the time came for him to be executed, they brought the state’s portable electric chair in a big truck from Jackson. We drove by and saw it parked in the back yard of the jail. The next day some older boys told me they had stayed up until midnight, with the lights on in their house, to watch all the lights dim when the nigger got killed.
    . . . I was playing with some older boys behind the Church of Christ chapel. Three barefooted Negro children appeared in the alley and began rifling through the garbage can. One of them found a rotten apple core and started eating it. The other two stuck their heads inside the can looking for things. We stopped our game to look at them. One of the older boys I was playing with whispered, “Damn little bastards,” then said in a loud voice, “What you boys
doin’?
” Before they could answer he ran at them and shouted, “Get outa here, you little coons!” and we all chased them away down the alley.
    . . . One rainy night in September one of the Negro shacks in the river bottom near Mound Street toppled over. The shack belonged to a garrulous old Negro named Henry who worked on odd jobs for several white families. When my friends and I found out what had happened, we walked across town to take a look. One of the four stilts had broken, and the whole house had simply flopped down at an angle. Henry and his family had been listening to the radio in the front room, and had slid right into the kitchen. The family had moved out, but there was the house, tilted over at an impossible angle, its backside splintered and broken. A light drizzle was falling, and the more we looked through the rain at that crippled old house the less we could help laughing. The image of Henry, the radio, and the whole family sliding into the kitchen was too much. We laughed all the way home, and more the next day when we saw Henry and asked after his condition, and he said: “I picked up fifty splinters